Mechanism of all-optical control of ferromagnetic multilayers with circularly polarized light

Rajasekhar Medapalli; Dymtro Afanasiev; Dokyun Kim; Yassine Quessab; Sergio A. Monotoya; Andrei Kirilyuk; Theo Rasing; Alexey V. Kimel; Eric E. Fullerton

Mechanism of all-optical control of ferromagnetic multilayers with circularly polarized light

Materials Science 2016-07-12 v1 Optics

Authors: Rajasekhar Medapalli , Dymtro Afanasiev , Dokyun Kim , Yassine Quessab , Sergio A. Monotoya , Andrei Kirilyuk , Theo Rasing , Alexey V. Kimel , Eric E. Fullerton

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Abstract

Time-resolved imaging reveals that the helicity dependent all-optical switching (HD-AOS) of Co/Pt ferromagnetic multilayers proceeds by two stages. First one involves the helicity independent and stochastic nucleation of reversed magnetic domains. At the second stage circularly polarized light breaks the degeneracy between the magnetic domains and promotes the preferred direction of domain wall (DW) motion. The growth of the reversed domain from the nucleation cite, for a particular helicity, leads to full magnetic reversal. This study demonstrates a novel mechanism of HD-AOS mediated by the deterministic displacement of DWs.

Keywords

all-optical switching ferromagnetic multilayers circularly polarized light domain wall motion helicity-dependent aos magnetic reversal

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.02505,
  title  = {Mechanism of all-optical control of ferromagnetic multilayers with circularly polarized light},
  author = {Rajasekhar Medapalli and Dymtro Afanasiev and Dokyun Kim and Yassine Quessab and Sergio A. Monotoya and Andrei Kirilyuk and Theo Rasing and Alexey V. Kimel and Eric E. Fullerton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.02505},
  year   = {2016}
}

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5 pages, 4 figures

Mechanism of all-optical control of ferromagnetic multilayers with circularly polarized light

Abstract

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